2017 Budweiser Super Bowl Advertisement

Everyone who stops in here knows that I have less than zero interest in football.  So, I'm truly one of the people who are really only interested in the advertisements.

So, when Budweiser decided not to go cutsey this year, and instead go dramatic with a post about their founder well, heck, I'm interested.

Well, how was it, historically?

Probably not too bad in general terms. That is, if we're looking at the story of a sinjgle 19th Century immigrant, this isn't too bad.  It depicts things fairly accurately.

What about the story of Adolphus Busch?

Well, unfortunately, I don't think so.

Busch was a German immigrant, to be sure, and the ad does do a nice job of showing what immigration for some people was like.  I don't think there's an element in the ad that's not generally accurate in a generic sense.

Busch himself, however, was the son of wealthy parents that were in the brewing and winery supply business.  He was well educated and a graduate of the  Collegiate Institute of Belgium.

He was also the twenty-first of twenty-two children.

Yes, 21 . . . out of 22.

Take that Duggars.

In 1857 he came over with three brothers, not alone, as they didn't stand to have any sort of an inheritance, given that there were so many of them.  He went to St. Louis as that was a town with a lot of Germans in it, and it was a good place to set up brewing beer.  All three of his brothers entered into the brewing business in some sense, but only his brother Ulrich, Jr, who married the daughter of Eberhard Anheuser, also went to St. Louis.

He served in the Civil War and tried his hands at various businesses, all brewing related.  In the meantime he married another daughter of Eberhard Anheuser, was also in the brewing supply business, and after the Civil War was in a position to buy out partners in a failed, bankrupt, brewery.  As luck would have it, he actually did inherit part of his father's estate.  He combined his prior efforts with buying out his father in laws brewing business and then renamed it Anheuser-Busch.

There's a lot more, of course, to the story than that.  But that's a start.  Obviously, it departs from the advertisement quite a bit.